logo-prompting

Logo Prompting

Writing a good logo prompt is a compression problem: you're translating a brand's strategy and voice into a short, literal, image-model-legible spec — while actively fighting the model's own priors, which default to AI-startup visual clichés (gradients, neural nodes, glowing orbs, soundwave bars) unless explicitly told not to.

This skill exists because a logo prompt has two failure modes, and they pull in opposite directions:

1. Too vague → the model falls back to generic SaaS-logo training-data averages.
2. Too literal / over-specified → the model draws exactly the clichéd icon you named (a phone for a calling app, a shield for security, a lightbulb for ideas) instead of an abstract mark that earns its meaning.

Good logo prompting threads between these: specific about constraints (palette, type, mood, what to avoid), abstract about the mark itself (suggest, don't depict).

Before writing a prompt: gather the four inputs

Don't start typing a prompt cold. Pull these four things first — they're the actual inputs, the prompt is just their compressed form:

1. Brand truth — read the project's brand.md if one exists (Strategy + Voice + Visual layers). If there's no brand.md, ask for the equivalent: what the brand is, what it's not, the archetype, the core promise. A logo prompt with no brand truth behind it is decoration, not identity.
2. The Visual layer specifically — Colors (exact hex, named tokens, and their usage rule — which color is primary vs. reserved-for-one-state), Typography (display face + weight + roman-only), Style keywords + reference brands. See references/brand-visual-layer.md.
3. Intake context — what is this mark actually for (wordmark, icon-only, favicon, both), what does it need to survive (16px favicon, dark mode, embroidery, print), who reads it (a shift worker at 2am glancing at a phone screen reads differently than a landing-page visitor). See references/logo-offer-questions.md for the fuller intake list — use it as an interview checklist when the user hasn't already supplied this.
4. The anti-slop guardrails — the specific clichés this brand must never look like (see references/anti-slop-discipline.md). Every brand has its own version of "don't look like a generic AI startup" — for a fintech it might be "no padlock icon," for a care-work app it's "no clinical cross," etc. Name the negatives explicitly; a model that isn't told what to avoid will reach for it.